Information and Imagery from Ukraine

Oleksa Hryshchenko

Oleksa Hryshchenko

Oleksa Hryshchenko (1883-1977) was a modernist painter, art scholar and author. During a brief stay in Paris in 1911, he met local artists – including the Ukrainian artist and sculptor Alexander Archipenko – became interested in cubism, and went on to study in Italy from 1913-1914. In 1917, he became an art professor in Moscow and was offered the post of director of the Tretyakov Gallery. But he escaped from Russia to Turkey, living in Istanbul from 1919-1921 and painting hundreds of watercolors before moving to France and exhibiting his Istanbul paintings in Paris. He also traveled to Greece and Crete to paint landscapes from 1921-1923, eventually settling in the south of France in 1927 and shifting his style from cubism to expressionism. In the 1930s his works were displayed in Lviv, and after WWII he had several exhibits in New York and Philadelphia. In 1963 he established the Alexis Gritchenko Foundation, to which he donated over 70 works (now housed at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York). In the 1960s, the Soviet authorities destroyed some of his paintings from the Lviv museum collection as examples of ‘bourgeois formalism.’ In 2006, his paintings in New York were officially transferred to the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv. He died in Paris.